Lobb is an e-commerce platform for the trucking industry. It helps truckers and transporters to do business transactions in a more transparent, efficient and profitable manner ensuring a much better experience for all parties concerned OR for all stakeholders.

Monday, 20 November 2017

The LOBB Story: Bringing Digital experience and efficiency in to Logistics

A year ago
Bhaskar Bonepalli, a veteran agent of the logistics industry, would be troubled
with calls throughout the day to arrange trucks to meet requirements of
operators. He often had to call these truckers and head to the truck stop in
Hoskote, where he is located, to arrange trips. Entered LOBB, the two year old startup, which went ahead and took away the headache of physical discovery of business from operators. Today Bhaskar sits at home and he knows how many logistics companies or operators require trucks and he absolutely knows how many trucks in his network are available. LOBB is an acronym for Logistics Business to Business. It is a technology company that brings truckers, agents,logistics companies and businesses all under one platform where there is seamless integration of business and flow of money.

The logistics company puts in its request on LOBB and this
information is available to agents who immediately provision a certain numbers
of trucks. From there on LOBB pays the truckers an advance and provide them
details of the shipment and the destination for dropping the cargo off. This
system makes everyone in the ecosystem agree upon a price and service. The
trucker gets his money and also has a diesel card, which allows him to redeem
for fuel in any HP bunk across PAN India. Being a powerful tool it
has now more than 10000 truckers on its platform along with more than 200 large
companies integrated on the platform. “My asset utilisation has increased thanks to the company,”
says Bhaskar Bonepalli, who owns Bhavya Roadlines.

What can LOBB do for
you?

It is estimated that India spends 13 percent of its GDP on
logistics. This is a very high number because globally in a developing economy
the logistics cost is around 8 percent. The Indian number is very high because
of the lack of transparency in the ecosystem.

Shivkumar, Head of
South Region, for Inland Logistics in Chennai says that with LOBB’s app there
has been absolute price transparency and availability of business. “I always
found trucks serving us through their ecosystem and they help a company like us
who are in constant need of trucks to move items,” he says. The availability on
a real time basis is made possible only because there are a number of agents
who have taken to this system because their asset utilisation has increased and
they want to receive money digitally.

Thingal, the manager of fleet company VR links, agrees with
Bhaskar. He says “Truck utilisation, transparency and digital payments are key
features of LOBB. They are a very disruptive company”

Today LOBB has all its agents receiving money through NPCI’s
BHIM app, which makes the

system accountable. If you ask the LOBB founder Venu Kondur and Jayaram Raju
about their journey to make this system go digital, they will tell you that
they addressed the problem by figuring out the pain points in the entire
ecosystem. The pain points were:

For the trucker: It was to increase asset utilization.

For the Agent: It was to increase revenues with asset
utilization.

For the operators: It was to provide timely trucks.

For companies: It was to ensure price efficiency and digital
transparency across the system.

“We had to integrate all these processes on to our system,”
says Jayaram Raju. He says that they have even been able to decrease graft in
the system. With LOBB
putting the entire system together there is absolute information symmetry.
Today the company has grown 20X in last 10 months and is already making a dent in the logistics ecosystem in trucking centres
across south India.

With 90 percent of Indian logistics being disorganised, LOBB
is definitely a refreshing model that can map consumption and
demand through trucking trips, and has the potential to scale up soon.
Now, only time will tell if the truckers and agents take to using this
technology.